“The sovereignty of Ada, as the-contemporary-American-woman-as-archetype increases with age, yet what is actually on her mind is never divulged. And in that indeterminate zone, anything is imaginable.”
Alex Katz’s East Interior from 1979 is a vast and vibrant synthesis of the artist’s two most illustrious muses—his wife Ada and the East coast. Dually lit by the glow of night sky and the luminescence of interior, the painting is uniquely imbued with a temporality often evaded in Katz’ portraits but which demonstrates the artist’s atmospheric ability to narrate through subtle shifts in hue. Part of several of the artist’s painterly explorations of East and West interiors in the late 1970s, East Interior specifically alludes to the artist’s haven of many years, his home in coastal Maine. Attesting to its resounding significance, East Interior was featured on the poster for the exhibition of Katz’ paintings held at the Hokin Gallery in Florida in 1980, and a sister painting entitled West Interior from the same year is held in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Conceived at a t.mes ly moment, the painting was also created the year Irving Sandler published his celebrated monograph of the artist.
With her signature thick dark hair, full lips and warm gaze, the sitter of East Interior is instantly recognizable as the stylish and bewitching Ada Katz, featured here in an intimate proximity to the viewer. The artist has created more than two hundred portraits of Ada since their 1957 meeting, and her influence on Katz’ oeuvre and the larger frame of contemporary art cannot be overstated. As critic and curator Robert Storr has written: “The sovereignty of Ada, as the-contemporary-American-woman-as-archetype increases with age, yet what is actually on her mind is never divulged. And in that indeterminate zone, anything is imaginable.” (Robert Storr In: Exh. Cat., New York, The Jewish Museum, Alex Katz Paints Ada, 2006, p. 19).
PORTRAITS OF ADA IN MUSEUM collects IONS
Wearing a blouse striped with primary color, Ada is here set against the backdrop of a mustard yellow window, the pane of which carries her shadow. Peering through this window, one is met with a midnight blue sky, a tangerine moon and a framing silhouette of foliage. Ada’s neck in this portrait is markedly narrow and extended; as in most of Katz’ portraits, anatomical correctness is forgone for pseudo-realist figuration. Katz has commented on and questioned the pursuit of defining his work as distinctly realist or abstract, noting: “So my contention is that my paintings are as realistic as Rembrandt’s…it was realistic painting in its t.mes . It’s no longer a realistic painting. Realism’s a variable. For an artist, this is the highest thing an artist can do – to make something that’s real for his t.mes , where he lives. But people don’t see it as realistic, they see it as abstract. But for me it’s realistic.” (Alex Katz in conversation with David Sylvester, March 1997).
Having begun painting in New York City in the late 1950s, Katz was surrounded by Abstract Expressionism. It is particularly notable, then, that Katz chose to instead pursue his own style forged by an investment in figuration and flattened perspective. Lauded for his ability to imbue commercial and pop art aesthetics with personal experiences, Katz creates portraits that, while t.mes ly and specific, vibrate with universal resonance. In East Interior, shallow planes of solid color converge to compose a portrait that is as intimate as it is enigmatic. Oscillating between warm and cool tones and interior and exterior, this painting is rife with juxtapositions. A decade after East Interior, Katz would begin to focus less on portraiture and more on landscape painting; the present work, with its inclusion of an evening vista, alludes to this oncoming artistic shift. Thus, East Interior is a multidimensional marriage: of Katz’ artistic past and artistic future, of public and private spheres and of his two greatest muses.
